Not long after former 5th District Congressman Denver Riggleman hosted a Republicans for Harris event at his Nelson County distillery in August, he was swatted.
Swatting is a criminal hoax, a false emergency call is made and police are sent to an unsuspecting victim’s address. “Thank God that law enforcement, and the county commissioners and the commonwealth’s attorney know me so well here,” says Riggleman. “The swat came with my address without my name, and they were on the way here when it was stopped, from what I was told.”
Something else comes with the territory of being a Never Trumper: “A massive number of death threats,” he says.
Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer who owns a tech company and two distilleries, says he didn’t see himself in politics at all until he sought the Republican nomination for governor in 2017 and was elected to Congress in 2018.
”I ran out of pure rage,” he says, after dealing with the “overwhelming ridiculousness of the bureaucracy” at the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control and with Dominion Energy wanting to run the Atlantic Coast Pipeline through his property. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy).
“I became so angry and felt that no one had a voice, even me — military, a successful CEO, a business owner — I was absolutely impotent to make any changes,” he says.
That rage helps him understand the appeal of former President Donald Trump to the MAGA faithful. He sees Trump as the culmination of the Tea Party, “the perfect candidate for those who believe the establishment is out to get them or that have a belief in a globalist or deep state against the common man and woman.”
Riggleman says he might be the only Republican in Congress endorsed by Trump who didn’t vote for him in 2016 and 2020.
Even before he went on to serve as a senior staffer on the House Select Committee on January 6, investigating the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Riggleman had inklings that Trump was, as he puts it, “a nut.”
During his one term in Congress, he met with Trump and with Freedom Caucus members behind closed doors, and he said he began to see that their understanding of tech and how government works was faulty.
“There was no nuance, no ability to think outside this far-right box,” explains Riggleman. By 2020, “I knew I wasn’t going to vote for Donald Trump, and I think a lot of that had to do with the fact he was a virulent conspiracy theorist, and his inability to determine facts from fiction, I think, is a real threat to the United States.”
Riggleman lost his bid for reelection in 2020 after he officiated a same-sex wedding for two campaign volunteers. “I find it amazing that those who believe in freedom of thought and freedom of religion would be so against how people live their lives,” he says.
But he thinks he had alienated the party establishment before the wedding. “I always thought I could be a New Republican, a live-and-let-live Republican,” admits Riggleman. His first year in office, he says he tried to play the game and vote the way he had to vote to get reelected. “Because I thought maybe I could make a difference. However, you start to lose a part of your soul as you vote against things you should probably vote for.”
David Richards, chair of the political science department at the University of Lynchburg, says Riggleman often pushed back on the more far-right moves Republicans made. “He seems much more of a moderate,” observes Richards. “In today’s Republican party, that’s a hard position to be in.”
It was Riggleman’s “anti-sycophantic DNA” that really pushed him over the edge. “I started being confrontational with people in my own party,” he recalls. “And pretty much telling them to get out of my face.”
Bob Good, who worked for Liberty University, defeated Riggleman in a COVID-era drive-through convention in Campbell County, where Good had served as a county supervisor.
The local GOP and Good “circumnavigated” Riggleman, says Richards, and “cut him out of the Republican Party like a lot of moderates have been in the last decade.”
Good became leader of the Freedom Caucus, and he endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president. When DeSantis dropped out of the race, Good was unable to get back in Trump’s good graces, narrowly losing the Republican primary in June to the Trump-endorsed candidate, state Sen. John McGuire.
Riggleman initially denies any schadenfreude about Good’s loss because “McGuire is worse.” But he goes on to confess he is happy Good lost. “What sane, normal person wouldn’t be?”
McGuire, he says, took selfies at the Capitol on Jan. 6. What angers him “is this is the original district of James Madison, and to have people [representing it] who can’t even tell the difference between fact and fiction, I think is a real detriment to the 5th District.”
Through his work on the House January 6 committee, Riggleman was able to access former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ texts, which led to Ginny Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and a host of conspiracy theories.
“So whether it was conspiracy theories about the National Security Agency using secret programs to change the votes, or it was about Dominion and Smartmatic redirecting votes through Chinese servers, or satellites changing votes, or whether it was white vans pulling up and absconding with ballots, or — these are some of the crazier ones — there were German server farms redirecting votes for Joe Biden. The list goes on and on.
“Every single one of those conspiracy theories, one way or another, were in the text messages,” he says. He also noticed a strain of Christian nationalism. “So it was a combination of fantastical beliefs, crazy ideas and that God wanted Trump to win, and there was a globalist deep state takeover of the American election system.”
Richards suggests that by taking part in the Jan. 6 investigation, Riggleman was “thumbing his nose at the people who edged him out,” and it was a way for him to say, “‘I see you and know what you’re doing, and I don’t like it.’”
Riggleman got the call for Republicans for Harris from a former colleague of Adam Kinzinger, who serves on the board of Riggleman’s artificial intelligence company. Both former congressmen, ostracized by the Republican Party, also share a U.S. Air Force bond, says Riggleman.
Riggleman admits he had to think about signing on. “My lone objective is to make sure Donald Trump isn’t elected.” And while he wants Harris to win, he doesn’t believe “joy” is a viable course of action.
He believes a Harris win could help reclaim the Republican Party as the small government, live-and-let-live, strong-foreign-policy-and-defense party it once was, reemerging from ”the ashes of this s— show that’s been happening since 2015.”
To do that, says Riggleman, it’s necessary to eject Trump and his followers. “If you’re looking at this like a military plan, the first thing is you have to cut the head off the snake.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although he’s made many, many media appearances, Riggleman says he isn’t too keen on politics at this point. But he cites one motivating factor for speaking out against Trump, despite the toll on his family.
“I was a small kid, and boy, I got my a– kicked all the time,” he recounts, “and that’s why I went into weightlifting and football, because I absolutely hate bullies. Up until the age of 10, I ran from bullies. After the age of 10, I fought them. And I think you find out it just becomes part of your DNA. You know, if I have an anti-sycophantic DNA, I also have an anti-bully DNA.”
What troubles him about Trump supporters is that he believes “they’re being lied to by people in authority to mine them for money and for grift. And that is really what a large portion of the GOP is about now, is how to make politics a profit center for these types of individuals.”
While running for office doesn’t appear to be in his future, Riggleman says he’s never been busier. His tech company, Riggleman Information and Intelligence Group, is “incredibly robust,” with contracts and massive investment coming in, he says. He likes writing, and his 2022 book, “The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th,” did well enough that he’s considering another, this one on Elon Musk.
And he appeared in the 2023 documentary “Against All Enemies,” about veteran radicalization in the GOP, especially surrounding Jan. 6. “Because I love my military brothers and sisters,” he says, “and I don’t want to see them led astray by a mouth breather like Donald Trump.”
